Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir

by George Clinton

  One of the brightest of the new wave lights, Thomas Dolby, appeared on that record, playing keyboards. He came to our attention through the label; he was on Capitol, too. He came to Miami at one point and we went deep-sea fishing. We were after amberjack, which is the fish of choice when you want to give a tourist an exciting fishing experience; they bite and take the line straight to the bottom when they hit. They were heavy and strong, so I got him an electronic reel to help him bring them in. Thomas was one of several younger musicians who contributed to the record. I wrote the title track with Doug Wimbish, who had been the house bassist at Sugar Hill Records and later went on to play with Living Colour. And I did a song called “Bangladesh” with my son Tracey Lewis. Tracey, who recorded as Trey Lewd, was like an even more cracked version of Junie. What was strange about Tracey was that I hadn’t been a part of his life for years. He had worked all around in the record industry as a young kid, done some sessions with Sidney Barnes, who had been my partner in the early days at Jobete. When Tracey finally came to me, he was fifteen, and he was on the wild then, into everything all at once. But I could tell that he was brilliant, that he saw everything from such strange angles. I loved how his mind worked when he wrote lyrics, how he found his way to the least expected combinations of ideas. We hadn’t grown up together, but when we got together, it was like we had always been that way.

  Tommy Silverman, who founded Tommy Boy Records, started doing a music conference he called the New Music Seminar, and in 1984 he invited me to speak. It was a great lineup; I would be on a panel alongside Madonna, who had just made her first record, and James Brown. Before the event I tried to be smart and told James to give me eighteen splits. He did it before I could even get the words out of my mouth. Then he came back at me and told me to give him two splits; I busted my nut even before the first.

  The seminar came at an interesting time in the music industry, just after the birth of MTV, right in the midst of the corporate record world of the eighties, and the panelists were articulate and interesting about how pop music needed to rethink its aims to appeal to younger audiences. After the event, this kid came up to me and introduced himself. He had read an interview with me where I said that I thought some of the new wave acts, including Thomas Dolby, were at the vanguard of funk. In the interview, I had said that if history was any indication, some white group from Europe would end up being the Led Zeppelin of funk—the same way that Page and Plant had co-opted blues, some British group would redeploy funk and make it the planet’s preferred music. This kid objected to my analysis. He told me that it didn’t have to be that way, not if I would produce his band’s record. His name was Anthony, he said, and his group was called the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I shook his hand and told him that when he and his guys were ready, they should come out to my farm. About two months later, there was a knock on the door.

  The Peppers were a California band, but they were comfortable in Michigan—Anthony’s family was from Lansing, which was only about fifty miles from where I lived. We rehearsed, wrote songs, and did preproduction. I took them into the hood to one of my friends’ studios, one of those places where music was recorded by day and drugs were sold by night. Then they went home and came back about two months later for more recording. In the meantime, I had checked up on them, and they checked out; my son Tracey, who was out in L.A., knew about the growing funk scene, bands like Fishbone, and the Peppers were in the same circles. They had a following, and they had musicianship, and they had charisma. I started to think that maybe Anthony was right, that they could be the group to bring funk to the masses. I figured that the labels were itching to get a white group to take the music truly mainstream. They couldn’t do it as long as we were still in the lead. Partly it was because we wouldn’t let them change the word funk. There was constant pressure to do so. Even some of the P-Funk band members were embarrassed by it. It kept them definitively black. And they saw other bands, whether it was Earth Wind & Fire or the Gap Band or whoever, moving subtly away from it into pop or rock or that unlabeled crossover space. The Peppers had a unique ability to stay funk and rejuvenate the genre.

  They brought me some songs, and we wrote some more. They also had the idea that they would pick one big song from the past to do on each record. On their first record, they did a Hank Williams song, “Why Don’t You Love Me.” On the records they did after they worked with me, they tried Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground.” On the record I did with them, Freaky Styley, they covered Sly’s “If You Want Me to Stay.” It was instructive and then some. When we started, Anthony could not sing at all. He could chant and he could shout. He was a vocalist for sure. But if you do a song like “If You Want Me to Stay,” you’re going to be able to sing by the time you finish learning that shit. It was an education for me, too: I would have never tried to sing that song until I tried to analyze it for him. Producing the Peppers, and other young bands, put me back in touch with music from earlier decades as more than a fan.

  The Peppers, because they were young and white, could get away with a political directness that wouldn’t have worked for an older soul or funk band. At that point in my career, trying to refashion myself as a radio artist, I was very leery of saying some of the shit he was saying. I could have done it when I was younger, in the earliest days of Funkadelic, but it was a different time then. I was a little older. I was charting. I had formal responsibilities to bandmates and fans. My days of direct political speech were over.

  The Peppers also gave me a new perspective on drugs. The same thing that had happened to black stars with freebase and crack was happening to white rock stars with heroin. Seattle was the epicenter of that problem, but it went up and down the West Coast, from Layne Staley to Bradley Nowell to Kurt Cobain, of course. I saw that white groups were going to get pinned by heroin, and I told the Peppers to watch out. They didn’t. When they were with me, they were dabbling and more. We had to take one of them at one point and put ice on his nuts to keep him from dying. I saw them tiptoeing up right to the edge of what a body could bear. And then they went over: Hillel Slovak, their original guitarist, ended up overdosing in 1988.

  But I loved the Peppers. I had a great time with them. It was like in the early seventies, when we would bring new young guys into Funkadelic and feed off their energy. I was definitely a kind of mentor or teacher or father figure. I told them all the experiences I had and then let them draw their own conclusions. I made the same jokes that we had made in the barbershop back in Jersey. When they eventually cleaned up their act, they were just as addicted to straight living as they had been to smack. They went way past clean. We saw them again in Germany in the mid-nineties, and they were on a major health-food kick, all kinds of juices and tofus and whey. It was the same way with the Beastie Boys. When they were with us on tour, then they were wild as hell, and then later they had Buddhist monks touring with them. But like the Peppers, they reversed race in the best way: they had real skills and they used their platform to do interesting things. They were the cream of the crop.

  While we were working on Freaky Styley, the Peppers and I went to see Aretha Franklin play a show. The preproduction guy in the studio had a big white Rolls-Royce, so Flea and Anthony Kiedis and I packed in and we went to the concert hall. We were just clowning, being high and shit, and we ran into Aretha’s sister Carolyn before the show. “I’m not sitting with you,” Carolyn said, “because I know you’re going to act like a fool, and Aretha’s going to come down here and kick someone’s ass. I don’t want to be in the line of fire.”

  In 1985, the bankruptcy cloud spread: my assets were tied up in court, and it looked like I was in danger of losing my farm. I went to Armen and the two of us came up with a strategy to save the place. I let him administer all the songs that were still available. He could go and get anything I had coming. In return, he would pay off the farm, and he could keep an extra $100,000 for himself in the process.

  Things were
also shifting in my relationship with Nene. A few years before, I had started a project with my younger brother Jimmy Giles. The band was called Jimmy G. and the Tackheads, and the album, Federation of Tackheads, was shelved several times before it was finally released. Nene had received a $200,000 advance for the Tackheads record, and everyone was waiting on him to release the money. Jimmy asked, and asked again, and eventually Nene sent him $2,500. Then he went radio silent again. He couldn’t be easily reached down in Florida and people were getting agitated. Then a few weeks later, more small payments showed up for people in the band: maybe Blackbyrd got a few thousand, maybe Andre Foxxe did. Whatever the case, it was clear that most of the money was stuck with Nene. When I called him to see why it wasn’t happening faster, he acted like I was causing a problem, though he also sent me a few thousand, either from guilt or to quiet me down. By the time the money finally started to appear, I was furious, not really talking to him anymore. I knew things had to change.

  One day, Bob Young, who was head of business affairs at Capitol, called us and said that Nene was coming around the office looking for money; some of the payments from the Capitol albums were supposed to go through Tercer Mundo, the company that Nene and Archie had set up. Bob knew that we were uncomfortable with Nene, and he had an idea. “I think,” he said, “that I have some way that I can get rid of him for good.” Bob suggested that we buy Nene out for $70,000 and move everything from Tercer Mundo into another company, which we called EGMITT; it stood for “Everybody’s Gonna Make It This Time.” We went down to the Capitol Records office, me and Archie and Stephanie, and officially severed ties with Nene. He wasn’t happy, but he didn’t object. He was at a point where he needed the money. But he couldn’t resist one last play. Rather than just sign Tercer Mundo over to me, he insisted on signing it over to Archie under the theory that it needed to be protected from me. Archie, of course, signed it right over to me. We were finished with Tercer Mundo and, as far as we knew, finished with Nene.

  I have a soft spot for the last solo record I made for Capitol, R&B Skeletons in the Closet. That’s the record that brought me new musicians like Amp Fiddler and Steve Washington, who helped me do amazing things. Most people want to do records cleanly for radio, and sometimes that works brilliantly. It worked with Neil Bogart for Parliament. But as a solo artist, especially after the freedom I earned with “Atomic Dog,” I was always thinking along more radical lines. I wanted to make music that most people might not fully understand at first, but that they’d come back to the year after that, or a decade later. Art outlasts charts. Amp was a jazz musician, and he helped create some of these extended pieces on the record, sort of like Bernie had done a decade before. There’s a multipart composition called “Mix-Master Suite” that picks up where “Loopzilla” had left off. In my mind, it was more in keeping with musique concrète composers, a way of using samples and interpolations to design a new type of classical music. Ten years after the record came out, it was working in a well-established mode, and maybe then it was more easily digestible.

  There were some great moments on that record. One of the singles, “Hey Good Lookin’,” had backup vocals by Vanessa Williams, who had been crowned the first black Miss America and then forced to resign in the wake of a nude-photo scandal. Another single, “Do Fries Go with That Shake?” charted higher than any other solo single except for “Atomic Dog.” R&B Skeletons in the Closet was also my first attempt to deal directly with hip-hop. I had been aware of it since just after Uncle Jam Wants You, especially in the New York area, where kids would come out with their boom boxes and start rapping over background music. It was connected to Jamaican toasting a little bit, and to the dozens, which was the comic playground insult game kids had played as long as I could remember. I liked the energy of rappers, the way they combined musical simplicity and intricate wordplay, and I liked the idea that a turntable was an instrument. The minute they got an Anvil case, they were musicians.

  It was also a lifeline for funk. Music kept changing, year after year, and if you didn’t embrace change, change would just turn its back on you. As rap grew into hip-hop, another element came into play, which was building your new song on an existing foundation, and sampling soul and funk. Hip-hop gave us a chance to get back in the game. Where else are you going to hear your own music? On a K-Tel compilation? It didn’t hurt that early rap grew right out of P-Funk. One of the earliest songs I can remember, “Funk You Up,” was by a girl group called the Sequence, which included Cheryl Cook, Gwendolyn Chisolm, and the future solo star Angie Stone. They were like the sister act to the Sugar Hill Gang. They didn’t sample the song outright but replayed a section of it, which meant that rights had to be secured through publishing channels. I didn’t understand that fully at the time, though. No one did, really, except maybe Armen. He was already designing ways of collecting on our publishing whenever a section of a P-Funk song was incorporated into someone else’s work, even if the sample (and thus the master) was never used.

  Financially, rap would turn out to be a major factor, but I was focused more on the creative aspects of the genre. And they were a mixed bag. After that first surge of creativity, I heard mostly average hip-hop acts. They were competent but not spectacular. Every once in a while, though, the genre would throw out a genius and I would perk up. The first time I can remember that clearly was in 1987, when someone played me Eric B.& Rakim’s “Follow the Leader.” I had heard lots of rappers by that point, but that fucking record stopped me absolutely dead in my tracks. It was a what-the-fuck moment. The lyrics on that record, with that cool flow, sounded just like the Five Percent Muslims I had heard preaching years before in New York. When they chant, they add knowledge. Rakim had that cadence down perfectly. And his words had meaning for days: they were street, poetic, witty, wise. When I heard that record, I felt like I hadn’t done anything in the music business. Damn, I thought. I have to start all over again. It was a feeling I loved, like a boxer coming out of retirement. There was excitement at the tips of my fingers.

  The other hip-hop group that had me from the start was Public Enemy. When I heard “Bring the Noise,” I knew that they understood the way that sound could either organize upward into music or dissolve into chaos, and how both of them were parts of the same continuum. When you admit what you’re making is noise, you’re halfway there. They had the vocals and the sonics: they said it right off the bat, with “Bass, how low can you go?” In P-Funk, we were always tuning our guitars down or setting up Bernie’s synthesizers to get the deepest vibrations possible. They had the ideas. “Can I tell them that I really never had a gun?” was top-level thinking about the ways that criminals get created, how society needs to identify enemies so it can protect its idea of itself. And they had some of the same sensibilities that made P-Funk work. They had concept albums and affiliated acts. Most important, they had a sense of how to treat their own product so that they were taken seriously without being taken too seriously. Chuck D was the chief information distributor, but Flavor Flav put a check on things with comedy. Some of the people in their circle didn’t understand at first how things were supposed to work. Professor Griff spoke out of turn, which he had the right to do, but he did it without the proper balance, without the proper coordination with Chuck and Flav, and that disrupted the group’s carefully organized structure. The grace note with Public Enemy is that I had something to do with their name. For years, I didn’t know that it was my voice saying “Public Enemy” on their record. They had sampled from “Undisco Kidd” and slowed the vocals down.

  The thing I admired most about Public Enemy was that they figured out how to be outspoken in corporate America, which was nothing easy. When John Lennon said that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, he got in trouble, and he was John Lennon. I understood what he meant, but that’s not the lesson I took from the controversy. Lennon’s remarks taught me that everything significant has to be leavened with comedy. When I’m asked about something serious, I try to make jokes becaus
e deep down, I know that I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. I don’t mean that I’m wrong about everything, or that there’s nothing I’m right about. I mean it as a matter of philosophy. How can I be so presumptuous as to say something definitively bad or definitively good about somebody? If there’s a controversy already in place, I’ll sometimes weigh in, but I try to be clear that it’s just my opinion. It’s clear to me fairly quickly that there are at least two sides to most questions, and that the other one is just as valid as yours. That’s why tolerance is the only thing that really makes sense. Take sexual orientation. I know what I prefer for me. It hurts me when I poop, so I can’t imagine anything going up in my ass. I don’t even like to hold my own dick when I pee. But what do I know? Anything in the world can be sexy to a person. I’ve seen motherfuckers fuck radiators. I’ll fuck a gay girl if she lets me. And so if I’m ever asked seriously about gay rights, I tell people exactly what I would tell my kids and my grandkids. Do what you want in life. Do what you are. If you talk to me, I’m not going to put you down. I’m going to help you become you. Over the years, we’ve played with musicians who were straight, and we’ve played with musicians who were gay. Why should I care? I don’t give a fuck who he’s fucking. Can he drum?